Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday March 20, 2009 @12:12AM
from the allegedly-no-holds-barred dept.

Bioware has confirmed rumors that development for the sequel to Mass Effect is well under way, and they're planning on a release in early 2010. They mentioned PC and Xbox 360 versions of the game, but no information was given about a possible PS3 version. CVG has a write-up of what we know about Mass Effect 2 so far. Quoting: "In the shooting department the developer's official announcement promises 'intensified combat' and 'expanded weapon options.' We're hoping some of the work goes on improving the game's shooting mechanics, which were solid enough but could certainly do with some polishing to meet 2010 standards — especially in the cover system department. As for 'expanded weapon options,' we can only assume this refers to the in-depth gun tweaking and customisation options available in Mass Effect 1."

The mako controls were awesome. I could make that thing turn on a dime and run circles around those giant serpents. I've never felt more connected to a game vehicle except for the warthogs from Halo. I explored so much of each planet it's just not even funny. I spent literally hours navigating mountain ridges just for the hell of it. It's like they took lunar lander and made it 3d and awesome.

I would like to see a smaller 'aerial/space fighter' type ship which can be launched from the main ship, a la the Mako, and some missions/maps which bring an element of an old school 'shoot-em-up' to the game. The mako missions, to some extent, did that a little bit, but I have an immersion problem with a deep future, high-tech game where any time you are on a planet, you are moving in a slow tank - that makes no sense most of the time; I can see that certain missions could require a tank (like a mission where you have to go into some sort of cave/tunnel system, or there are too many SAM turrets guarding an area so it would be suicide to fly through) - but the simple truth is that almost all of the maps in the original Mass Effect would have made sense to use a small fighter craft to fly to one of the bases, shoot the small number of rocket launchers with your air craft, then land (I'm assuming VTOL capabilities here - not unreasonable since we already have VTOL in real life) and enter the building.

But, as with you, I would also like to see your main ship actually become part of the gameplay as well. I was rather disappointed it never was. Would even be cool if the Mako, Fighter, and Main Ship were upgradeable over the course of the game (for example - the Mako had some vertical thrusters, but there were many times I wish it had some horizontal thrusters which would give you a small 'forward' boost (where 'forward' is the direction along the axis from the rear of the mako to the nose of the mako, so for example, if you are climbing a steep hill and the mako 'stalls' it's upward/forward motion, you could get a little boost to help you finish climbing; the downward boosters were almost useless most of the time because they would just launch you off of the mountain and you'd proceed to fall all the way down to the bottom).

The final few couple of things I would have liked to have changed in the game are, 1) inventory management: it would be nice if I could quickly find and turn all the true low-value junk into gel quickly; 2) Sell off all the medium-value stuff quickly without much hassle, and spend my inventory management time considering which higher-value stuff I want to keep, and which stuff I want to sell. Inventory management is the one thing that just *killed* my enjoyment of that game. I had fun, until I had to stop playing for 1/2 an hour at a time to deal with inventory.